I’m quite useless for at least the first one and a half hours after waking up. My strategy is ritualization. In this time I do the same things in the same order every working day: I get up, make breakfast for our cat, take my meds, switch on the coffee machine so it can heat up, shower, shave, brush my teeth, dress, emty the dish washer, make coffee for my self and (if she is already awake) one for my wife. Then pack my lunch, grab my headphones and go to the bus stop. All those things I can do with minimal brain capacity since I have done them the same way thousands of times. And when I arrive at work I’m at least 80% awake.

Yep. This is partly why I work US PST/PDT hours despite living three time zones eastward. If I couldn’t get to sleep until 2:00 am my time, I can still get eight hours of sleep and be up an hour before work. And because West Coast folks tend to be less anal about such things (they just care that work is getting done and communication is happening), if necessary I can start an hour or two late on days when there are no morning meetings.

I also only take my first Dexedrine dose unless it’s a very bad day for focusing and I don’t have any morning obligations the following day.

Do you exercise? What is your diet like?

I know you’ve probably heard all of this before, but once I started running like 1 hour a week (20 minutes at a time was super manageable for me) and paying a bit more attention to what I ate my sleep schedule and morning alertness became way more consistent.

I’m literally exhausted all the time. I know some of it is my (poor excuse for a) diet. I just never have any energy. I really have to push to do anything.

Yes. Getting up is so exhausting